Giles Ober and his two Algonquin Regional High School classmates were ecstatic when their lip-synched video showcasing the school's spirit soared to more than 30,000 views in just a few days last week. Then YouTube pulled the plug.

"Everyone's devastated -- the faculty, the administration, parents within the towns," Ober said. "It's been overwhelming."

The video -- a virtual tour of the school, while students lip-sync to the tune of Owl City's "Good Time" -- involved more than 950 Algonquin students and was produced by Ober along with classmates Nic Zanghi and Samuel Huddart as part of a marketing class for school. They posted the video on YouTube March 4. YouTube removed it shortly after it appeared with a story on telegram.com last Thursday.

Since the video is for an educational institution and no profit was being made off it, Ober said they were confident that their use of the Owl City tune fell within fair use. They even went the extra mile and included a link to the song on iTunes where it could be legally purchased.

That song is owned, however, by Universal Music Group, which Ober said asked YouTube to take the video down. A call to Universal from the Telegram & Gazette was not returned. It caught the students off guard.

"I'm surprised that any music company is even attempting to do this kind of pull-down," said William L. Boesch, an attorney with Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak & Coen. Boesch specializes in intellectual property law. "It does sound like fair use. They're not trying to profit from the video or the performance of the song."

Ober says the school has received offers from attorneys connected with the Algonquin community to help and have been asking Universal to reconsider.

Copyright is an issue students at St. Peter-Marian shouldn't run into. Three days before Algonquin published its video, St. Peter-Marian published its own school-wide lip-sync video. Although they probably didn't need to due to their use of it, the school purchased a license for the music they chose, "Home," which was popularized by American Idol alumnae Phil Phillips. Then, they performed it themselves.

Senior Dezi Garcia appears near the beginning of the video singing and playing guitar before other students take over in typical high school lip-dub fashion. In this case, however, it is Garcia's voice and guitar you hear. Using Apple's GarageBand Studio, Garcia recorded classmate Maria Zammarelli and several other students singing backup before laying down a track of his own voice.

"Dezi made it his own and they recorded it in the studio. He's a very talented musician," said Julie Kursonis Kreuz, director of Advancement and Admissions at St. Peter-Marian. Kreuz directed the video along with administrative intern and theology teacher W.R. Driscoll.

Kreuz said the school was looking for an innovative way to market itself to prospective students and promote school spirit.

"We were tossing around some ideas and some of the sophomores brought our attention to lip-dubs," Kreuz said. We watched a few online and figured this would be a great idea."

Kreuz said the issue of copyright came up in discussions and they decided even though they had the right to record the song for the private school, they'd go the extra distance and purchase the rights. Like Algonquin's project, however, it was no easy task. The video involved nearly all of St. Peter-Marian's 500 students. It winds non-stop through the hallways of the school for three minutes and 45 seconds of the song and then transitions to a pep rally in the gym.

"We created so much school spirit from the students coming together," Garcia said. St. Peter is like a big family and we just all came together as one."